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Welcome to Back of the Napkin, musings from Serviette for the cultured world. The new year brings with it a renewed sense of focus, a doubling down on our tireless quest to discover what makes “good” taste. More books! More reading! More discovery that is not mainlined to us via an algorithm!
Several texts have made their way onto the newly christened Serviette Syllabus, a living resource for studying what and why taste is cleaved into a contrast of good-bad. This will provide a basis with which we can share a common language to discuss taste, an idea inspired by E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s book Cultural Literacy. Reading along is encouraged, and suggestions to add to the list are welcomed.
Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu is the taste urtext. First published in 1979, the book examines how taste—particularly in art, culture, and consumption—is shaped less by personal preference than by social class, education, and access. Bourdieu argues that what we call “good taste” often functions as a system of exclusion. This taste-expressing structure is still alive and well. It’s a dense read, but with density comes plenty of ideas to parse.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, cultural critic Walter Benjamin considers what happens to art when it can be endlessly copied. Written in the 1930s, the essay introduces the concept of “aura”—the unique presence of a work tied to its time, place, and ritual. Mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argues, erodes this aura, democratizing access while also flattening meaning. This remains useful for thinking about taste in an era of AI slop, infinite products, and countless opinions. What, if anything, still feels considered?
Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth Century France by Michael Moriarty (with a Serviette green cover!) traces the historical moment when taste became something that could be defined, debated, and regulated. Focusing on France, the book explores how aesthetic judgment became tied to morality, politics, and social order. Taste, here, is not personal expression but public behavior. This is a reminder that knowing the rules allows one to bend them with confidence.
In Cultural Literacy, E. D. Hirsch Jr. argues that shared cultural knowledge enables communication, participation, and social cohesion. The book famously proposes a common canon. Open the schools! What interests us is less the list itself than the premise: taste operates as a shared language. Knowing the references does not require obedience to them, but it does make conversation possible.
Here’s a fun addition: Manners from Heaven by Quentin Crisp, which approaches good behavior as an aesthetic choice rather than a moral obligation. Part etiquette guide, part philosophical provocation, the book treats manners as a form of self-definition. Crisp’s version of taste is unapologetically personal, occasionally impractical, and deeply intentional.
Fragrance may be one of humanity’s oldest cultural tools. As outlined in Scent and Chemistry: The Molecular World of Odors, the use of scent predates written history and likely emerged alongside early control of fire. Seen this way, perfume is taste made airborne, inviting close, comparative smelling—not to decide what you like immediately, but to notice how preference forms at all.
You’re warmly invited to join as we haphazardly dissect these volumes—to track down these texts, underline them, argue with them, abandon them halfway through if necessary. We’ll be returning to these ideas, quoting, paraphrasing, and occasionally misbehaving with them as we continue to explore how taste is formed here in Back of the Napkin and across everything Serviette touches.
Serviette Syllabus:
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
Quentin Crisp, Manners from Heaven: A Divine Guide to Good Behaviour